"Today's 'stimulus package' is psychotherapy for a nation that very recently has become too fixated on the stock market, which has declined three consecutive years for the first time since 1939-41. But the stock market and the economy are not identical, and indeed they have diverged--the market slump has been more severe than the recent recession, the mildest since 1945." —George Will

I wholeheartedly agree; we have been way too focused, and continue to be so, on the stock market as our primary economic indicator. It is an important indicator, I’ll grant you, but if we learn anything from the dot-com bust, it is that no matter how hard we would like to become a paperless, information-based economy, real money is still to be made in industrial and service sectors of the economy. This recession that we’ve found ourselves in is merely the economy, and the stock market, correcting itself after the overvaluation and over-inflation of the stock market during the dot-com boom.